Former Soviet officer accused of massacre

Konstantin Nikulin, a former member of an elite Soviet police squad, has gone
on trial in Lithuania accused of taking part in a notorious massacre of
seven Lithuanian officers.

Former Soviet special forces commando member Konstantin Nikulin Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Matthew Day in Warsaw

1:38PM BST 15 Sep 2009

He faces murder charges connected with the execution of the seven at the Medininkai border crossing with Belarus on the night of July 31, 1991.

The Lithuanians, a mixture of border guards and police officers, were captured by men of the Soviet interior ministry's Special Purpose Police Squad.

Ordering their prisoners to lie on the ground they then killed them with shots to the head.

One man survived but was left in a wheelchair by the severity of his injuries.

Nikulin, who later took Latvian citizenship and changed his name to Mikhailov, has denied any involvement in the crime, but if found guilty faces life imprisonment.

On Monday a court in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, rejected a plea from the 42-year-old's lawyer that the case be thrown out due to statute of limitations, clearing the way for a trial that could further trouble Lithuania's fraught relationship with Russia, which ruled the Baltic state for 50 years.

Successive Lithuanian governments have expressed deep frustration over Russia's refusal to question or hand them over three other suspects in the case, leading to accusations that the Kremlin is sheltering the men.

The Medininkai raid was the bloodiest of a number of attacks on Lithuanian border posts after the country declared independence in 1990.

Refusing to recognise the Lithuanian declaration the Soviet government ordered a military crack-down on the posts, which had mushroomed on the Lithuanian border as tangible and symbolic evidence of the country's determination to shed the shackles of Moscow rule.

At a ceremony in July to mark the anniversary of the Medininkai massacre Dalia Grybauskaite, Lithuania's president, said that punishing those responsible for the murders was a "matter of honour and dignity" and promised that "justice would triumph."